With day one of Mobile Games Forum Seattle in the books, it’s time to reflect on the day as a whole and talk about some general takeaways. Starting the day off was Mobile Games Forum’s newest Director, George Osborn, giving a small introductory speech and highlights that attendees could expect from the two-day event. In addition Osborn went on to say that after their Seattle event, MGF will be renaming to just “Games Forum”.

With the name change from Mobile Games Forum to just Games Forum, this is an interesting shift in where the conference thinks the industry is going. As George briefly touched on, the name change is aiming to broaden the scope of the event outside of just mobile platforms. With eSports picking up in popularity these days, which takes place mostly on console and desktop, I think it’s a smart move to make in renaming.

The event keynote started with Emily Orrson of Minecraft‘s Product Marketing division. Orrson’s talk revolved primarily around cross-platform play and Minecraft is a perfect example of such. With the game being on mobile, console, and desktop player’s can take their content anywhere they want thanks to the cross-platform functionality. This poses a challenge for companies whether it’s designing the User Interface, marketing the game to consumers, or balancing content updates for more than one platform. Overall Emily Orrson’s was topic and presentation was quite insightful, both from a gamer and journalist perspective.

Going back to a broader topic now, the speaker choice and topics on day one were very interesting. From my perspective seeing all the analysis, research, and data collection that developers do on their audience and players is fascinating. Being able to learn about all these topics though presentations here at MGF on day one was an enjoyable experience. Overall I’m definitely impressed with the speaker lineup and variety of topics here at Mobile Games Forum Seattle.